The Pit of Shame

This article examines the complicated relationship between affect and power in the production of urban space. Focusing on a valuable site in the Basmane neighborhood of İzmir, which is conspicuously named Pit of Shame due to its neglected condition, it analyses the discourses and practices that relate the site to shame. Although the discourse around shame has been largely mobilized by supporters of neoliberal policies to justify profit-generating projects on the site, close examination reveals the emergence of different spatial practices and discursive twists on shame by ethnically and economically marginalized groups that have inhabited the site. Based on the latter, the article aims to contribute to the existing literature on the relationship between space and affect by focusing on alternative mobilizations of shame towards different political ends concerning a specific spatial and historical context. Informed by both recent socio-cultural studies on the relationship between affect and the production of space and psychoanalytical and Deleuzian theories of shame, it shows that how a particular affect is mobilized in relation to a specific space is far more significant than what affect is mobilized.